A definitive biography of the late Victorian solider, whose autocratic successes in Sudan and South Africa inspired adulation in the metropole, but left him unprepared to lead Great Britain during World War I. The scale of strategy and scope of operations were too great for one man; the lessons learned were put to good use in World War II. Written in the tradition of political-diplomatic history, the book relies on primary sources from the highest levels (i.e., autobiographies) to portray this thorough (his motto) and driven but ultimately indecisive figure. Kitchener was unable to rally and guide equals, or defeat evenly matched colleagues / opponents, because he could not persuade or rely on staff to create superior force. Magnus moves briskly through events, while providing insight into Kitchener’s relationship with Asquith, Churchill, and King Edward, as well as the mechanics of British imperial machinery. This 1958 work, though evidencing dated punctuation, has lost very little with the passage of time. No need to read further on the topic.
Book abstracts
13. Millard, Cloud Computing Law (7 July 2023)
Limns core and emerging concepts of legislation, jurisprudence, and policy regarding software, platform, and infrastructure as IT services, focusing on the European Union and United Kingdom circa 2020. To this reader, the most pertinent topics may be divided as operations, commercial matters, and taxation.
Operations:
• Cloud services, for purposes of governance, are fundamentally different from outsourcing in terms of design and control and geographic nexus
• PaaS is indicated by large degree of client control over specification or complexity of usage
• Security
o Security by nature entails risk management, as rules can never encompass all use cases; risk management is well suited to principle-based regulation (common in UK and Australia). For this reason, insurance is commonly part of risk management
o Misconfigurations are the largest internal threat to security
o To establish one’s services as a ‘trusted execution environment’, one should encourage the client to consider whether the vendor’s security setup is better or worse than the client’s own systems
• Data transfers
o across international borders may be governed by any of several mechanism (e.g., Privacy Shield, Standard Contractual Clauses, approved bespoke certifications)
o The acceptability of the SCCs to the EU is premised on the former’s compliance with the recipient country’s standards (e.g., the Australian Privacy Principles)
• Privacy: data sharing (e.g., among companies) is a controller-to-controller sequence; conversely, controller-to-processor is provision and instructed use. See chart p. 311 (which further demonstrates that Jacobi’s control of platform security, etc., make it at least a joint controller)
Commercial matters:
• The most negotiated clauses are liability (12 months’ fees being standard) including carveouts; service levels including availability; security and privacy; lock-in, portability, and exit; and intellectual property rights
• An estimated 1/3d of negotiations fail over the transparency of using subcontractors
• Data residency and indemnification for 3d-party claims are frequently client imperatives, increasingly joined by transition plans. APIs have come to be seen as acceptable means of interoperability or portage
• Pre-commercial procurements (PCP) are a means for public buyers (government) purchasing and then sharing emerging technologies without violating state-aid strictures of GATT
Taxation
• The most fluid question is re-establishing consensus of jurisdiction: where is value created? The residence of a provider’s 3d-party infrastructure does not create nexus (because the provider does not control hardware); however the location of the end user (the client) might. There is dispute among OECD and UN principles,
• Cloud fees (including PaaS) are generally taxed business profits not royalties
• A service that is linked (i.e., not separable) is likely to be singularly taxed, rather than as separate products or business lines
14. Oren, Six Days of War (4 Nov 2007)
Narrates the 1967 conflict which shaped succeeding geopolitics of the late 20th-century Middle East. Based on primary sources from most of the combatants (save Syria), the comprehensive work points up the Arab world’s explicit linking of Israel and the US over 40 years ago and the imperious role of defense minister Moshe Dayan, whose de Gaulle-like introduction to Levi Eshkel’s cabinet overshadowed the indecisive prime minister. Oren’s scholarship is somewhat tempered by choppy prose (i.e., howevers, buts, yets) that obscure the sweep of his direction. Though definitive, the work also seems to have been superseded (dated) by Islamofascism, which has positioned the Arab-Israeli problem as but one stumbling block in the feudalistic worldview’s inability to peacefully coexist with modernity and the West.
15. Morison, Strategy and Compromise (18 Nov 2007)
Limns the Allies’ key strategic decisions of World War II, dividing them geographically between the two major theaters and presenting them sequentially within each. Europe takes pride of place because America committed to defeating Hitler first. The author, an admiral turned Harvard professor, is frequently critical of the British predilection for nipping Europe’s edges (as well as its quibbles with American resources sent to the Pacific), but acknowledges Overlord would have been more difficult before 1944, once Torch was approved in 1942. Island hopping the way to Japan also was a synthetic solution (thus the title), but Morison speaks relatively little of the decision to use atomic weaponry. Admirable introduction, great Mill Valley library pickup.
***16. Cannadine, Mellon (15 Dec 2007)
An exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) biography of an oligarchic, reticent banker who became an admired Treasury secretary, until the Great Depression turned the tables on the socioeconomic assumptions he had lived by. Mellon, whose father was an austere, Scotch-Irish magnate of western Pennsylvania, grew very wealthy by financing vertical businesses in heavy industries as well as banking. Mellon fils expanded into chemicals, electricity, and oil, extending the Judge’s model. He was, however, emotionally stunted and his marriage a disaster. In Washington, he should have left after the end of the Coolidge administration (his second); not only did the Hoover era end badly, but Roosevelt deliberately pressed trumped-up (and sensationally dismissed) tax fraud charges. Notwithstanding, Mellon saw fit to donate the whole of his grand art collection as well as build the National Gallery to his country (and adopted city). Fine scholarship.
11. Pfeffer, Leadership BS (20 June 2023)
The leadership-training industry is broadly disconnected from contemporary practice, which is Machiavellian in pursuit and use of power. Leaders should be true to the external situation, not ‘authentic’, which ideal epitomizes the cant of value-laden prescriptions often inapplicable to demanding roles. Trust is bound to constrain options; those who violate trust aren’t held accountable because power trumps penalties. In difficult times, administrators protect those closest to them, their sources of power. One should presume others (i.e., rivals) are acting of self interest.
More constructively, Pfeffer sees that ‘walking around’ management closes gaps among people, helps leaders understand the front lines. Promoting from within magnifies culture. Get over ambivalence – act on incomplete data with conviction.
Pfeffer’s ‘realism’ never takes him beyond the normative. Thus the ability to misrepresent is possibly the most critical skill of leadership! However much debunking is needed, pyscho-sociological study is no substitute for elaborating competencies (i.e., the Troop Leadership Development 11) in the context of events, objectives, problems. An apology for power yet falls short of principled management.
4. Klibansky and Paton, ed., Philosophy and History (27 Feb 2020)
A festschrift for Ernst Cassirer treating philosophy, history of philosophy and history of ideas, historiography, and related pursuits. Author names are given in underline:
- Alexander
: the permanent features of things appear at different times in different forms; it’s permissible to think of forever in terms of now so long as we consider essence not surface characteristics. Novelty is the essence of history, explanation is the work; determinism in history means asserting pre-arranged necessity instead of changes in form over time.
- Webb
: philosophy is different from history, science, etc. in declining to accept precepts; but it may settle on some and proceed from these. Consciousness, such as religious consciousness, is finite. Yet philosophy cannot ignore religious consciousness because of finitude: Athens cannot disprove Jerusalem.
- Gilson (one of the better essayists)
: there is no great scientific discovery dating to the Middle Ages. Science rose in opposition to medieval philosophy and theology. Save the Aristotelian Leibniz, all chose between science or scholasticism. But they are not irreconcilable: scholastic philosophy has only to become true to itself to reconcile with science.
Descartes converted ideas to mathematical models, bereft of discourse, representing reality itself. Scholastic ideals could not be reduced to expressible content; they are something other. His successor was Hobbes: the effects of Cartesian metaphysics spread to proto-sociology. And thence to political philosophy – servitude to all powerful state derived from liberties!
The antinomy of philosophy consists of 1) the irrationality of building the collective (the state) from irreducible individuals versus 2) man is nothing, humanity is everything. Aquinas and Duns Scotus held they are reconciled in the real: the antinomy is manmade. In the other words, the error is Cartesian reduction to science (mathematics), which decrees a priori thee real is the sum of the real.
Aristotle’s mistake was to biologize the inorganic; Descartes’ to mathematize physics, chemistry, biology, metaphysics, and moral theory. Every ‘nature’ requires a formal principle, but not every form is living. Then metaphysics is the science above natural sciences, and its problem of defining existence is superior. For this reason, Christianity cannot allow metaphysics to expire
- Groethuysen
: reflection on the self occurs in different forms: religion, art, philosophy.
- Gentile
: historical fact is not presupposed by history. ‘Ideas without facts are empty; philosophy which is not history is the value’s abstraction’. The truth of the past lies not in facts but in imaginative use of what happened (or was happening). Does this trend toward existentialism?
- Stebbing
: without time there is no causation; without causation there is no time. The possibility of causal order is the sole condition for a time sequence in nature
- Medicus
: the final problem of the Kantian system is the unity of object and subject, of nature and freedom, which is treated in
- Critique of Judgment
. How does it assert itself? ‘Intransferable uniqueness’ is one’s calling, according to Cassirer; an era has it too – but neither are usually well defined – more usually they are in a form of questions. The historian is the servant of a culture’s self-awareness, not in obsequious search of power but truth. ‘The longest view is always from the heights’. For Cassirer, the object of history is the fulfillment of humanity.
- Brehier
: the history of philosophy commenced in the 17th century from Cartesian thought, and circa 1930 needs reworking. Documentary evidence, standing in for tradition, stands in the way of understanding what happened. Historical truth does not involve truth of the thought in question
- Hoffman
: The Platonic idea is behind Augustine’s philosophy of History
- Levy-Bruhl
: Descartes attacked the authority of tradition because it could not be demonstrated by scientific method. History was lumped together with religion
- Saxl
: veritas filia temporis – truth reveals itself over time. Art struggles with abstract concepts such as truth. The scientific age settled the war between the ancients and moderns on the side of the moderns, which admitted no abstract truth.
- Wind
: there are several commonalities at the intersection of history and science. The information which a document reveals requires presupposition of understanding the contents themselves in the first place. The observer of events is an intruder, and the dividing line between observer and participant is difficult to fix. Until recently historians and scientist were cloistered; now their discoveries could be world-changing
- Pos
: Philosophy is never deductive like math. Knowledge is relative in the sense that it’s open to interpretation and permeated by ‘alien’ (unproven) concepts
- Gundolf
: the two predominant objectives of historiography are to preserve the past as it actually was (Ranke) and whether to interpret the past in light of a) providence or b) universal laws.The pattern recurs in German historiography: German practice springs from the philosophically minded Herder, and thence to Ranke
- Ortega y Gasset (another standout)
: the most decisive changes in humanity are those of belief.
Historical reason is more demanding than scientific reason, which does not understand what it’s saying, only that it can be proven true. Science’s loss of the ability to express truths is mortal to civilization. Reason, in modern times degraded to mean the play of ideas, was in Greece and the 16th century understood as being in contact with the order of the cosmos / providence. It was itself a faith.
German idealism represents the attempt to place man before nature, like positivism. Hegel in particular demonstrates the lack of intellectual responsibility, evidencing a bankrupt moral climate.
Philosophy since Kant has been a ‘second apprenticeship’, pursuit of discovering authentic reality. Thought has its own form and projects these onto the real: man cannot escape. We must de-intellectualize the real to be faithful to it. But: nature is a transitory interpretation of what man finds around him. He has no nature; but he has history. Only under the pressure of events (history) do we differentiate between what we are and what we imagine ourselves to be: we become compact, solid.
- Klibansky
: history can be described as a science inasmuch as philosophic precepts (e.g., Kantian regulative principle or Platonic sense of normative pattern from ideas) order its proceedings
18. Ferguson, Empire (31 Dec 2008)
Portrays the trajectory of Britain’s international role from 1650-1950, concentrating on the empire’s leading territories (Caribbean, America, India, southern Africa). Its primary themes are that England imitated its European rivals in acquiring by piracy; resulting migrations were large and sometimes explosive; missionary zeal set the social tone and liberty the political ideal; and the empire’s resolve to defeat Nazi totalitarianism. Though it can be read as an indictment, the book appears to conclude missteps and excesses do not superceed the many benefits of cultural transfer including land tenure, banking norms, common law, team sports as a principle of community, representative and limited government, and the idea of liberty itself. Ultimately a curious cross between history and political science. Its claims to pertain to 21st-century America aren’t clear. An enlightening introduction and conclusion.
1. Beevor, The Battle for Spain (10 Jan 2008)
Chronicles the Spanish Civil War, a rich and hotly contested field that is a rare example of history dominated by the loser’s point of view. Pre-1930s Spain was so splintered and polarized that the combination of inept government, labor agitation in straightened economic circumstances, and conspiring generals (aided by the Church) led to rapid mobilization and then open warfare. Republican forces began with Madrid and Barcelona as well as the strategic edge; but primes inter pares Franco consolidated rightist forces and made fewer mistakes — particularly as the right was not beholden to propaganda. Both sides treated the opposition and civilians wantonly, and the fighting was both a microcosm and a proving ground for Europe (including Soviet Russia). Though focused on personal leadership and ideological conflict (particularly among Barcelonan leftists), Beevor skillfully depicts daily fighting. A worthy followup to
- Stalingrad
.
2. Najarian, How I Trade Options (29 Jun 2008)
A breezy, loosely organized introduction to options trading combined with Jon’s worldview and snatches of personal biography. Many anecdotes are dated. Jon’s voice is authentic, but in the online era the format is longish and might have been more compelling as webinars.